


Ruined Everything Right

by prettyaveragewhiteshark



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canonical Character Death, During Canon, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mild Blood, Mild Gore, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:01:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29368914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettyaveragewhiteshark/pseuds/prettyaveragewhiteshark
Summary: Set immediately after the events of Gideon the Ninth, this is my take on what things would have looked like from Coronabeth's perspective when she comes to after the fight with Cytherea has already been won
Relationships: Camilla Hect & Coronabeth Tridentarius, Camilla Hect/Coronabeth Tridentarius
Comments: 2
Kudos: 24





	Ruined Everything Right

When Coronabeth Tridentarius woke up, she was alone. That is, alone in the sense that she was the only living being in the room. Not alone in the sense that she was the only body in the room. In  _ that _ sense, she was very much not alone, and the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the stunned, frozen profile of the recently dead Naberius Tern. Coronabeth did not scream, though she did feel something black and horrible rising in her chest, up through her throat, and when it reached the back of her tongue she rolled over, away from poor, dead Babs, and vomited. Not much came out; this was perhaps the third time she had vomited in as many hours, and by this point her stomach was all but completely empty. She coughed, and spit, and wiped the back of her hand against her mouth, closing her eyes as the room wobbled very slightly. 

“Ianthe,” she said, her voice sounding very weak and very small in the vast, ruined room. 

As she sat up, rising to her knees unsteadily, she realized that Naberius’s corpse was not the only one keeping her company. The white body of Silus Octakiseron lay in a wide pool of his own red-black blood, smothered by the heavy body of his cavalier. That’s right. Ianthe had killed them both, turning the hulking Colum on his frail uncle. 

Oh, Ianthe. Where had she gone? What had she done? The moments before Corona had lost consciousness were a nauseating blur, but she could remember one thing very clearly. Ianthe had eaten Babs,  _ Babs _ , and left Corona behind. The cruelty of it, the hideous, mind-spinning bafflement. Hadn’t Corona done enough to prove herself? She’d kept their secrets all this time, she’d practiced the rapier for hours and hours in private. She’d learned the charade of flesh magic, nearly convincing herself that the movement of muscle and blood had anything to do with the movement of  _ her _ hands, that it wasn’t all just Ianthe. Perfect, cool, powerful, beautiful Ianthe. Ianthe, who had left her behind. 

“Ianthe,” Coronabeth said again to nothing, to no one as she staggered to her feet. “Ianthe.”

She made her way unsteadily through the abandoned, decaying halls of the Canaan house. The First constructs were no more, having all collapsed into piles of bone and gray dust and crumpled white uniforms hours ago. The ruined house had been quiet before, but now it was stiller than any tomb, dead quiet as though some great shadow had passed through and sucked away any breath left in the air. Coronabeth’s heart stammered in her chest. How long had she been unconscious? What had happened to the rest of the houses? Had Ianthe done away with them all too?

Through the grief of sisterly betrayal, a separate, chiming thought broke through - had Ianthe killed Camilla? The fear was like a rabid dog, rearing up and closing its teeth around her throat. No, Coronabeth insisted to herself against every instinct that was singing  _ yes _ in her blood - no, Ianthe wouldn’t. Ianthe knew, she  _ knew _ , what Camilla meant to Corona. And she would never…

She would never go back on her promise to eat Corona and become a Lyctor together. She would never kill Babs without telling Corona first. She would never…

Corona pushed her way forward, through the halls, looking for signs of life. 

“Hello?” she cried. The empty halls swallowed her voice without an echo. “ _ Hello? _ Anyone?”

She passed the empty kitchen and dining hall, the stairs that lead toward the pool room, calling out all the way. Then she stepped onto the landing that fed into the glass-walled atrium, and found a battlefield. Bones like hideous, broken-off tree trunks were stuck to the atrium floor with great gobs of what looked like gray tendon, and piles of teeth and vertebra scattered across the floor like sprays of fallen, mummified stars. And there was blood everywhere. Streaked in long gashes across the walls, pooled on the floor, smeared on glass and marble. 

Across from the atrium was a ruined wall, groaning a little under its own weight, looking as though it had been punched by a giant a few times. Through a door in the wall, Corona could see the bright sun of the outdoors streaming in over a ruined balcony. And on that balcony, lying before a spiked iron fence, was a body. 

Corona recognized the black robes and spray of bright ginger hair in a heartbeat, and she was running then, running through the sagging doorway, kneeling beside the still and pale body of Gideon Nav. 

Gideon’s yellow eyes were open, and her mouth was frozen in a small half-smile, and she was very, very dead. Corona thought she would have run out of tears by now, but her ducts had decided to rally, and she found her vision blurring as she bent very slowly, her hands in fists around the bloodied black of Gideon’s shirt, and pressed her head to the Ninth House cavalier’s unmoving chest.

“Oh, Nav,” she heard herself whisper. “I’m so sorry. So very sorry.”

And she was. Coronabeth was so sorry. Gideon had not said much during these months in Canaan house, but Coronabeth had grown quite fond of the burly cavalier. She had sunshine in her bones, a warmth that would have made anyone scratch their head for a moment over whether she truly was Ninth House stock, and a heart a mile wide, a heart better than anyone else in this God Forsaken house. The last time Corona had seen her, Gideon had been gathering her up in those strong, careful arms, trying to soothe Coronabeth’s pain of loss. And now she was dead. Truly, fully dead, and Coronabeth was not a necromancer. She could not bring Gideon Nav back. 

She finally sat up after a long time, and reached out and closed Gideon Nav’s empty yellow eyes, and leaned forward and kissed her softly on the lips. Coronabeth stood, and looked around at the destroyed balcony, and saw everything she hadn’t because of Gideon Nav’s sudden and tragic death. 

There were the remains of a construct on the platform. A massive,  _ massive _ construct. Those tree trunk bones in the atrium must have belonged to this monster, and it must have stood twenty metres high upright. Its great death mask was larger than Coronabeth’s torso, and there were millions of bones scattered from where it had finally fallen after a vicious and bloody battle. There was more blood on the platform, forming pools around Gideon, and in a few places near her, and then two more further away, toward the balcony. In the center of one of those pools was something long and ghostly pale, like bone, but quite unlike bone. Corona moved toward it, and her heart was sick as she stepped into the puddle and picked up the dismembered arm. 

She already knew who it belonged to before a voice spoke up from behind her and said, “It’s Ianthe’s.”

Coronabeth turned and saw a very bloody, very dusty Camilla Hect attempting to hold herself upright on the sagging doorframe and only succeeding at doing quite a bit of sagging herself. Coronabeth was flying then, crossing the space between them and hitting Camilla’s body like a juggernaut, wrapping her in an entirely too enthusiastic hug, which she only realized after she had cried “ _ Oh, God, Camilla!”  _ and had heard Camilla’s answering grunt of pain. Then Corona was releasing the Sixth House cavalier hastily and apologizing and weeping  _ again _ and blubbering what she hoped were coherent words (“Camilla, I’m so sorry, you’re hurt, you’re bleeding, I thought you were dead, you’re not dead are you, oh God, Camilla.”) and Camilla was holding her at arm’s length and Corona realized that, speaking of arms, she was still holding onto Ianthe’s and then Camilla coughed a little and said, “I’m not dead. Not yet, at least.”

Coronabeth managed to pull herself together enough to place Ianthe’s detached arm very gently beside Gideon’s body, for safekeeping, and then duck under Camilla’s still attached arm and help her to sit on a nearby plinth on the balcony. Camilla’s very stoic face was very stoic, and only the low, quiet exhales betrayed that she was in any pain as she settled carefully onto the stone. 

“What happened, Cam?” Coronabeth asked.

Camilla the Sixth was very quiet for a moment, her dark eyes staring out to sea. “Dulcinea was not Dulcinea. She was a Lyctor named Cytherea, who killed Dulcinea and stole her body. She killed the Fourth and the Fifth, too. Pal is dead. Blew himself up to buy us time. We fought her, but it barely helped. Then Nav killed herself, and Nonagesimus ate her, and then she killed Cytherea.”

Coronabeth nodded as if she were not hearing the most incomprehensible string of phrases she’d ever heard in her life, and she didn’t ask any questions. There would be time for those later, and Camilla seemed to be slowly dying under the duress of saying so many words at once, and Corona didn’t feel like pushing it today. 

“Ianthe lived,” Camilla said, her dark eyes flickering to Corona’s face. “Lost her arm, but she lived. And so did Harrow. God came and took them and left us behind.”

“Christ,” Coronabeth said, and Camilla blinked once, showing an unusual level of enthusiasm in agreement with the curse. “What do we do now?”

“Blood of Eden,” Camilla said, and Corona thought that was perhaps a very fancy, very extravagant sort of swear that only the Sixth House used. But then Camilla said something else. “They’re coming for us. I think.”

Corona desperately wanted to ask what the  _ fuck _ that meant, but Camilla looked very pale and very dusty and her usually rock-steady sword hand was trembling lightly and seemed permanently attached to a leather pouch at her hip, and Corona knew that she was quite at her limit. So Corona wiped her tears, and straightened her back, and put Ianthe away.  _ Just for now _ , she promised the cold and distant mirage of her sister. Then she knelt in front of Camilla Hect and lay one hand very softly on a bloodied knee. 

“What do I need to know?” she asked.

“Just that they hate necromancers,” Camilla said. “They can’t know about Pal or Ianthe.”

Coronabeth nodded, and asked, “Are you dying?”

“Patched myself up. I’ll hold out til they get here.”

Corona searched Camilla’s eyes and her unreadable face, looking for a lie. 

“I’m alright,” Camilla said, and beneath the husky iron of her voice, Corona heard what she meant.  _ Not dying, promise.  _

Coronabeth left Camilla and went back to the atrium and picked up Gideon Nav’s abandoned rapier and knuckle knives. The rapier she belted at her hip, and she imagined that she heard Gideon’s voice, saw her little nod -  _ “Suits you, Third.” _ The knuckles she brought back to Gideon herself, and strapped them to her belt loop. For safekeeping. 

Then she picked up her sister’s cold arm, and walked to the edge of the ruined balcony, and kissed the palm, and threw it into the sea. She waited by Camilla’s side after that, the two of them seated on the plinth. When the Blood of Eden arrived in their starship, the disembarking crew took one look at Camilla and ordered her aboard to the med bay. The Sixth cavalier ignored them, and looked at Coronabeth, and together they slung Gideon Nav’s limp arms over their shoulders and carried her up the ramp, into the safety of the ship. They stood over her body for a long while after they had laid her to rest in the ship’s morgue, and it was only when Camilla’s knees trembled and Corona had to catch her to keep her upright that she allowed herself to be seen by the crew medic. 

The Blood of Eden found only one living soul in Canaan House, and Captain Judith Deuteros looked like she could hardly be counted as they carried her bloodless and barely breathing up the ramp on a stretcher. Coronabeth sat in the waiting room outside of the med bay, her fingers toying at the black hilt of the Ninth House rapier. She did not watch as the ship rose away from Canaan House, away from the stunning blue of the ocean and sky. She felt herself left behind as they rose through the atmosphere and emerged into the black, star-dotted expanse of space. She did not mind what she had left behind. She did not care to think too hard about it, but Coronabeth Tridentarius kept her hand on the hilt of Gideon Nav’s sword, and she felt something close up inside her chest, as slowly and unwillingly and inexorably as she had closed the eyes of the Ninth House cavalier. 


End file.
